Jessica Meyer on using music to connect a divided America

As a person who used to break out in hives just thinking about public speaking, I threw myself into the fire by taking a class on educational outreach while studying viola at Juilliard in the 1990s. In tackling my biggest weakness, I found myself with a Morse Teaching Artist fellowship to work in NYC public schools. My first assignment: getting surly and seemingly uninterested eighth graders to connect to Beethoven and other composers every Friday morning. In my early visits, I was met with incredulous looks and questions about why they should even care about these long-dead classical musicians. However, after lengthy sharing, improvisations and experimentation using rhythms the students did care about, we found ourselves on the same page once we actually heard Beethoven – we felt his intensity, his energy, his relentless drive… we understood.

For almost 30 years, I have been doing this kind of work in one way or another: leading participants in activities designed to help them better connect with the music they are about to hear, either exploring a particular concept together, or helping them ‘play around’ and make choices about sounds to express an idea. I would later train other emerging musicians from various conservatories and organisations like Ensemble Connect (a collaboration between Carnegie Hall and The Juilliard School) on how to best engage a community, a skill I feel is a deeply important for members of the music industry, regardless of whether they are a performer or a composer. On the one hand, you can see this mission as the preservation of our livelihoods. On the other, it can be seen as building a bridge for new listeners to connect with the sense of time, space, joy, pathos and everything in between that both new and old ‘classical’ music taps into. The transformations I have witnessed in how people perceive the music we care about ensure that I will continue to pound that drum for any conservatory student or worried presenter for the rest of my days.

However, it was not until I became a composer myself that I experienced how broadly our music can unite people. This past fall I visited different corners of America to work with the regional orchestras that are part of a commissioning consortium for my work Turbulent Flames. My first round of visits brought me to a Seattle suburb for the Auburn Symphony, to the beaches of Cape Cod, Massachusetts for the Cape Symphony and to the Idaho Falls Symphony where I drove to rehearsals in a massive pickup truck for the first time. I was very struck by how different each of these communities was from my home in New York City. Election season was also upon us, and it was difficult to avoid the polarising opinions all around me. Yet in the concert hall, I was surrounded by audience members revelling in the palpable shared energy and sense of community. This sentiment was recently reaffirmed during a trip back to my old High School, where a painted mural on the wall of my old orchestra rehearsal room proudly stated, ‘People cannot be enemies… at least while the music lasts’.

Whenever an orchestra performs my music, I offer to work within their community in the days leading up to the concerts. This is usually with students who already play an instrument on some level, and I encourage them to make up their own melodies, textures, or harmonies to express a certain emotion as part of my ‘Awakening Your Inner Composer’ workshop. Usually, I brainstorm with participants about what music can emotionally express and which choices we can make about sound to convey these ideas. I then focus on the concept of ‘joy’ and have them turn to those around them to discuss their own plan for writing music which expresses possible variations of this feeling. Next, after performing my piece Source of Joy for viola and loop pedal, I ask them to point out the compositional choices I made, then divide them into small groups with their instruments to make their own pieces expressing joy. If I am able to visit far enough ahead of time, I love incorporating their musical ideas into the piece I am writing for the orchestra or ensemble.

However, in Idaho Falls I found myself in front of an entire room of people tucked away in a community centre downtown who, for the most part, did not play an instrument. At first, I wondered what was possible in this situation besides a simple show and tell of my music with some audience participation. After searching out a few tables, grabbing some markers from the children’s centre and scavenging the nearby orchestra office for index cards and big sheets of paper, we were ready to make scores for pieces they would ‘compose’ for me to play on my looper, accompanying a short poem about joy that each group would collectively write. After going through the usual opening of my workshop, we pivoted to an activity where participants were given index cards and asked to write down their own choice of words expressing a particular kind of joy, which they would arrange into phrases and develop into poems within small groups.

Even after many years of doing this kind of work, my heart was full seeing folks studiously discussing the kind of sounds which might go with different lines of their poems. Groups of people from all walks of life – including shy high school students, unsuspecting adult friends of board members and grandparents dragged to the event by their grandchildren – were busy working together while being very specific about their musical choices. Scores of their final pieces were taped on the back wall of the stage, and I improvised each piece based on their directives as one brave group member recited their poems aloud. We all felt connected, united and moved by the music we made together and later felt the same about the music the orchestra played. We showed up; we saw – and heard – each other. We understood.

Jessica Meyer is a composer, violist and faculty member at the Manhattan School of Music. Upcoming concerts include additional performances of Turbulent Flames, a premiere for The Claremont Trio and Metropolitan Opera tenor Paul Appleby and a commission for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra to open their Carnegie Hall 2025-26 Season, for which all tickets will be free to ensure access for all.